“Architecture & Photography: Longing for the Past and Reconstructing the Future”

Announcement from H-Japan:

Upcoming event at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan:

Nichibunken Evening Seminar on Japanese Studies (143rd Meeting) November 5, 2009 (Thursday), 4:30 P.M.-6:00 P.M.

Speaker: Murielle Hladik

Topic: “Architecture & Photography: Longing for the Past and Reconstructing the Future”

Language: English

Place: Seminar Room 2, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 3-2 Oeyama-cho, Goryo, Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto 610-1192

URL: http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/

Abstract:

What are the relationships between architecture and photography? How has the photographic eye toward the past been used as an instrument for a (re)-construction of national identity? If in the West, modernity in architecture was constructed with a hypothetical tabula rasa, what about Japan’s interest in traces and remains of the past? What is the meaning of “past”? Is “past” not always a kind of reconstruction and even “a foreign country,” as stated by David Lowenthal?

Japanese modernity, which oscillates consciously or unconsciously between “tradition” and “modernity,” needs to be reinterpreted in terms of reconstruction of national identity. How did the photographic medium, used as an instrument of propaganda, play an important role in this (re)-construction process? The selective choice of an “image” of the past will be aired in textbooks on the history of architecture in Japan, but also becomes an image that will be exported to the West. This talk will explore how this re-invented image of the past serves as a reinterpretation of a phenomenon and (re)-creation of modernity, or even as a hybrid modernity.

About the speaker:

Murielle Hladik, an Architect with a Ph.D in Philosophy, is a professor at the School of Architecture of Saint-Etienne and a researcher at the Research Center for Contemporary Logic of Philosophy, University of Paris 8. Her research interests include Japanese aesthetics, comparative philosophy, and theory of architecture. She is the author of the book Traces and Fragments within Japanese Aesthetics (2008).